the birth of the Byzantine

Gibbon with a nice passage on the increasing pomp and ceremony once the Empire was relocated to Constantinople:

“The purity of the Latin language was debased by adopting, in the intercourse of pride and flattery, a profusion of epithets, which Tully [i.e., Cicero] would scarcely have understood, and which Augustus would have rejected with indignation. The principal officers of the empire were saluted, even by the sovereign himself, with the deceitful titles of your Sincerity, your Gravity, your Excellency, your Eminence, your sublime and wonderful Magnitude, your illustrious and magnificent Highness… By a philosophic observer, the system of the Roman government might have been mistaken for a splendid theatre, filled with players of every character and degree, who repeated the language, and imitated the passions, of their original model.”